Sternest Quotes & Sayings

Yet truth will sometimes lend her noblest fires, And decorate the verse herself inspires: This fact, in virtue's name, let Crabbe attest,- Though Nature's sternest painter, yet the best. — Lord Byron

Don't wait for other people to tell you whether you can do something. You can do something whenever you want. — Nick Lang

Can those entrusted with the gravest authority set any example save that of the sternest obedience to the law? — Calvin Coolidge

NOW, MY BRETHREN!" Poseidon's voice was so loud I wasn't sure if I was hearing it from the smoke image or from all the way across town. "STRIKE FOR OLYMPUS! — Rick Riordan

Most agreeable are the memories of events and labours, connected with the cruise:- of companions in travel, ... of coral islands with their groves, and beautiful life, above and below the waters, ... of lofty precipices, richly draped, even the sternest fronts made to smile and be glad, as delights the gay tropics, and alive with waterfalls, gliding, leaping, or plunging, on their way down from the giddy heights, and, as they go, playing out and in amid the foliage ... — James Dwight Dana

I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens. — Abraham Lincoln

Thank God for the battle verses in the Bible. We go into the unknown every day of our lives, and especially every Monday morning, for the week is sure to be a battlefield, outwardly and inwardly in the unseen life of the spirit, which is often by far the sternest battlefield for souls. Either way, the Lord your God goes before you, He shall fight for you! — Amy Carmichael

The main environmental challenge of the 21st century is poverty. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's hard to consider the environment 100 years down the line. — Bjorn Lomborg

The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance. — Frederick Douglass

There are quiet victories and struggles, great sacrifices of self, and noble acts of heroism, in it - even in many of its apparent lightnesses and contradictions - not the less difficult to achieve, because they have no earthly chronicle or audience - done every day in nooks and corners, and in little households, and in men's and women's hearts - any one of which might reconcile the sternest man to such a world, and fill him with belief and hope in it — Charles Dickens

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom. — George Bernard Shaw

The sternest commissar and the wildest hippie both share the same daydream: that a thing can be worth other than people are willing to give for it. — P. J. O'Rourke

These wedding guests could have done without wine, surely without more wine and better wine. But the Father looks with no esteem upon a bare existence, and is ever working, even by suffering, to render life more rich and plentiful. His gifts are to the overflowing of the cup; but when the cup would overflow, he deepens its hollow, and widens its brim. Our Lord is profuse like his Father, yea, will, at his own sternest cost, be lavish to his brethren. He will give them wine indeed. But even they who know whence the good wine comes, and joyously thank the giver, shall one day cry out, like the praiseful ruler of the feast to him who gave it not, Thou hast kept the good wine until now. — George MacDonald

Please clean your plate dear, the Lord above can see ya. Don't you know people are starving in Korea. — Alice Cooper

I love you because you're tender and sweet, you the hardest and sternest of men. And your sweetness and tenderness are such that they make you as light as a shred of tulle, subtle as a flake of mist, airy as a caprice. Your thick muscles, your arms, your thighs, your hands, are more unreal than the melting of day into night. You envelop me and I contain you. — Jean Genet

It is the hottest fire than forms the sternest steel. — Pierce Brown

Let a man neither give himself over to pleasures ... nor yet let him give himself over to self-mortification ... To the exclusion of both these extremes, the Truth-Finder has discovered a middle course. — Gautama Buddha

There is no horizontal stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls. — James A. Garfield

Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types - that is what I call dionysian — Friedrich Nietzsche

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life. — Adam Gopnik